Soon I’ll come back to your ground to sleep once more in your womb,
next to our mountains of snow, my mother’s sand plays just beyond.

I shall see from down below the roots of old, and truly
know that this singing injury has been full filled, disappeared.

SYMBIOTIC FORMS

RESPONSIBILITIESC W Hawes

She is only fifteen and already pregnant with her second child. Her mother, who is also unmarried, threw her out of the house this morning. Alone and with no where to go, she and her one-year old child had ended up at the county welfare office seeking assistance. I
look at her application and I look at her. A child having children with little clue as to what the responsibilities of adulthood are. I look at myself (almost four times her age) and wonder if I know what the responsibilities of adulthood are.

bright dandelions
and the lawn going to seed
tying the hammock

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEWC W Hawes

A quiet afternoon at work. Merging procedures manuals. A mug of chunmee tea is on the cup warmer and “Five Variations on Dives and Lazarus”by Vaughan Williams on my iPod. I pause for a moment to savor the tea and music. The thought occurs to me will anyone care about this new Info Management System in five years when I retire?
The project manager is young enough to be my daughter. Full of enthusiasm, she was nonplussed recently when a retiring supervisor gave her a twenty-two year old memo outlining the “new”Info Management System. It must be disheartening to realize the path you thought you were blazing is a well-worn rut.

shooing flies
away from the pie
hole in the screen

MIRRORSC W Hawes

Mist hovers over the field. I dive in, wading across. My feet are wet from the grass, laden with dew. My jeans and shirt, damp from the mist itself. The sun is not even a half-hour old. The air is cool upon my skin. In the air sounds of robin and mourning dove, a crow, my feet swishing the grass, the distant traffic. There are no human voices.
Rumi advised us to stop talking. He scolded us for not being familiar with inner silence. His recommendation? Polish our hearts for a day or two and make our mirrors our book of contemplation.

no thoughts on my mind
scent of crab apple blossoms
the taste of oatmeal

VIOLA TRICOLOR translated from the German by Celia BrownRuth Franke

At the garden center I am spoilt for choice. For Father’s grave I need pansies but it still takes ages to make up my mind. Such a variety of colours! Each of them has a different
expressive quality, some rather melancholy. Is that why Jacques Prévert described them as “the most sad and gloomy of all flowers”? Perhaps he knew that they are a symbol of Christ’s Passion?

Viola tricolor
a puff of wind
from northwest

While making my selection, I wonder how the flowers got their various names. Why are they called “Stiefmütterchen” in German? The ‘bad’stepmother? Hardly! According to a quaint folk tradition, the lowest, largest petal represents the stepmother, the intermediate petals of similar colour are her daughters. The uppermost petals – often of a different colour – are the stepdaughters.

A light shower at the hillside cemetery. With a small trowel I dig some holes for the plants and put them into the moist earth. The pansies gaze at me pensively. Perhaps they have their own thoughts about the new site: after all, they are also known as “Pensées.”

How appropriate for the grave of my father, who had pondered as much on Heaven and Earth as – centuries earlier – Blaise Pascal whose work he held in great esteem.

r a i n d r o p s
from clouds into blue sky
first swallows

BLANKENBURG translated from the German by Celia BrownRuth Franke

Never would I have suspected to find him here, the bronze lion. He gazes northwards from the Blankenburg Palace, the summer residence of the Welf dynasty, towards his counterpart, the original in Brunswick. For many decades the pair was divided by the Iron Curtain.
Grandmother often talked about Blankenburg, the setting of her youth, of her first love. Summer festivals, balls in the Palace gardens, the young Princess Friederike at the center of attention. They must have been about the same age.
I sit down on a bench in the deserted pleasure garden. Geometrically arranged flowerbeds, a fountain, just a few sculptures. There are no more pyramids of myrtle: the grottos, greenhouses, terraced gardens have all gone.

under the Linden tree
a young couple
tandaradei

What was life like for a young girl at the turn of the nineteenth century? A yellowing
photograph: a long, dark flouncing dress, the face under the veiled hat sincere and well-proportioned. No hint of the joie de vivre for which I loved her. How did she get to know Grandfather?
The path leads up the slope through the Palace gardens, now thoroughly overgrown, dominated by the gloomy Old Castle above. Dusk falls. A bench looking out over a small pond under mature trees. Long grass, rhododendron bushes already in bud. Was this where they met, my grandparents? It is very peaceful here.
In the darkness I follow the narrow footpath high up above the town to my hilltop hotel in the middle of the Upper Harz, a mountain region which I want to explore the following day.
a pale moon
glides through dark clouds
Walpurgis night

FROM BADDECK Ruth Holzer

You can drive all day and not see another person. Cold fog drifts in from Bras d'Or Lake, obscuring the path. A flash of black and white: the three-toed woodpecker that lives only here, well hidden in these high forests.

on the road
an escaped
mink

PHAISTOS
Ruth Holzer

...from the cool morning through the sage-heavy afternoon and into violet twilight, when the lost palace rises to its full height. Blue and red frescoes reappear on chipped gypsum walls. The large earthenware jars fill with grain, oil and wine. Minoan nobles are leaving their lustral chambers to gather in the central courtyard for the bull-jumping.

let me ascend
again the grand stairway—
remaining days

IN MEMORIAMLarry Kimmel

Aged ninety, he said to Milly, his daughter, “Something goes out of life when a man can't plan his work at night and see it through the following day.”

a childhood hero
still strops his straight edge
on a belt hooked to the wall
still ties Christmas ribbons
to Rusty's tail

And later that year, after the untimely passing of a son-in-law, he said, “Milly, now there'll be someone over there to meet me.” And that night, the last of the strokes took him, taking a week to do so.

a young man's hero
still the sought after genius
of Glenn Hollow
still tells his tales
shaded by wisteria

Believing life to be a continuum and having experience of others who have gone before me, why not him? Sometimes I think a stern grandfather (still the very image of a stoic) frowns down on once honed tools now left to rust.

gone these twenty years,
gone and yet . . .
"old man, I tell you—
you still walk the woods
wise as an Indian"

A KITCHEN FRAGRANCELarry Kimmel

A kitchen fragrance brings back the log-house on the hillside; morning crows from hill to wooded hill; the weathered barn; Betsy the cow; black raspberries in the upper pasture; chicken pens by the creek, chickens that cackled and some that cooed like reeds; and Rookie, the khaki-colored dog; and dirt roads that passed through pastures of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod; Whip-poor-will Falls; the cider press, shadowed by a fiery oak; apple tree branches, pewter in winter, pink in spring; the party-line of twenty-five rings; the wood furnace of my first-grade classroom; daffodil Easters; the returning crops; and Granma, who endured the seasons to the number of ninety-times-four.

baking utensils
the way she left them —
and if I could see her again
I’d not be impatient
. . . if I could see her

REQUIEMLarry Kimmel

Because it was filled to the brim, the goldfish leapt the aquarium. "But Mommy, why did Sam kill himself?" A short time later: "Yeah, an-an-and we can dig him up whenever we want to see him."

in a cool air
amid leaflets
and the gurgle of freshets
the upright stone
and a kind of grave excitement

ARE WE THERE YET?Patricia Prime

an old skeleton
in the gorge museum
of Cheddar Man
small hands map its history,
our mouths falter over words

I was eleven when the fated trip took place. My brother had climbed to the top of the bluff and was throwing stones. I can still see the rock hurtling towards me. It hit me on the corner of my eye, knocking me out. I must have fallen on to the rocks below and when I came round people were yelling. I felt the blood streaming down my face and realized I couldn’t see. It was a long drive to the doctor who cleaned and stitched my wound, administered a tetanus shot and gave me painkillers. A week later I had an interview for entrance to grammar school. I sat in a hall full of mothers and daughters, wearing two black eyes, a bandage round my head and cuts and bruises on arms and legs.

THE PAINTINGPatricia Prime

It looked like an English setting – rolling fields to the distant hills, a few trees in the foreground, a sheepdog lying in a patch of sunshine. The woods to the right. I gazed into this for hours wondering where it was, dreaming I was there as my grandmother spread butter thinly on slices of bread with a scrape of jam on top. I could smell the hay, feel the breeze on my face, and walk through the grass towards the hidden sea. It must have been England, a frozen piece of the country where I was born, from which I feel severed. Certainly the one to show me cannot.

if there were someone
that could piece together
my broken fragments
imagine – I would be
a different person

(Untitled)shirley cahayom

when i was a child, there was a valentine card with a black painted heart on top of our coffee table. inside were the words of an old song entitled “No One Will Ever Know.”

"no one will ever know
my heart is breaking
although
a million teardrops
start to fall "

my mother said that the card was given to her brother by an ex- girlfriend before my uncle got married. i don't know where that valentine card is now, but the image of the black -painted heart and the pity and compassion i had for uncle's ex girlfriend was deeply etched on my mind:
valentine boxes
empty of its heart candies
still red all these years
they remind me of the love
that was virginal and pure

my cousin emma and i used to sit in our garden especially during moonlit nights.we whiled away the hours strumming the guitar and singing old love songs.we talked about everything and nothing. sometimes we cried our hearts out over some unrequited love but most of the time we just stayed there amidst my mother's orchids in full bloom while the scent of jasmine permeated in the midnight air. a lot of times we stayed
on till the wee hours of the morning waiting for the flowers to bloom.

how can you totally
bury the past in oblivion
when there are memories
that haunt you
day and night ?

this summer, history repeated itself. my son and his friend spent some summer nights in the backyard enjoying their barbecue under the moon. just the two of them...talking probably about their girlfriends and the life as seen thru the eyes of 16 year old boys. it was almost 1:30 in the morning. i was so tempted to call them in. but in the end, i let them enjoy the warm summer evenings under the full moon. maybe someday they too would remember these happy moments in their lives.

childhood happiness
may last but for a moment
but memories can preserve
these moments
for all eternity

The scene … could well have occurred 50 or even 80 years ago, at the hot dog stand Nathan Handwerker set up at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island. The idea was to sell food made of quality ingredients – Handwerker insisted on all-beef franks – at aggressive prices to the hungry masses swarming out of the subway to
bathe at this proletarian RivieraLong Island Business News, ‘Best of the Wurst’

Call me Tsunami –
on the list of contestantsTakeru Kobayashi

appears, icecap cold
in this creaking world of girth,
but I flow warm as saki.

*
In the game of flesh
I slip past all contenders –
bratwurst, dumplings, roast pork buns

each extruded thing –
to burst through the open lips
of your warm and bready smile.

*Tsunami, I will! From the warm-folded centreof my self I sing your name,

rejoice in plentyfor I have tasted onlycrumbs on the earth’s bony road.

*

All comers – I stand
a five foot eight inch challenge
to your American might.

Hidden Pearl Harbor,
I liberate no payload
but still lay waste to your arms.

*

I have followed youfrom Nagano sushi barsto the wastes of Long Island,

opened doors for you,baked my limbs in your deep firesyet you shine at such distance.

For me you must chewthe globe – this festering ballof limitless indulgence

as though it was quitethe most exquisite repast,and worlds hung on each mouthful.

*

From the blinding light
a small Kasumi voice – eat!
Hoofs fall from my ears. I eat.

At fifteen, a gasp –
bears and elephants stumble
clutching their aching stomachs.

*

For one clean second
this vision – bellies bursting,
towels tossed into the ring

then ah! – tottering
the guts regroup and paddle
for the neon finish line.

*

Like some Chevrolet
rubbed clean by the spandex breasts
of a suburban car wash,

the opulent square
of a sprinkled desert lawn
I sail serene to the zone.

*

With terrible speedthe hand draws all to the mouth –split frankfurter, dripping bun,

an assembly lineof hunger. Like a deft foxI skirt the leavings of bears.

*

Twenty, twenty five.
Records drip on the concrete
with the stink of hot vinyl;

in the gallery
mouths drop as the tally man
runs out of pre-printed cards.

*

I break thirty, more –
forty and soon forty five.
Women swoon, men start to duel.

In some distended
universe the gods slacken
their belts, belch admiration.

*

Fifty – the crowd shrieks,sighs; American triumphwithers in the long shadows.

For you have swallowedtheir pride, my love. Come with me –sing in this empty palace.

AUSPICIOUS JOURNEYS
Ayat Ghanem

11 years gliding, precipitations hail
opal drops, cascade of bursting gems
in this perpetually wintry amble
I stroll. London inspirational city
home to my hopes, you fulfilled all
and more. Imaginings born
in the midst of your cobblestones
nurtured in cloud bursting tulle skirts
soaring in blustery deluges.

breast cancer quilt
I pull it
over my head
hide my eyes
from the unsightly gash

WORDS FROM ARIELSylvia Plath

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white scull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road –

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool,
fixed stars Govern a life.

From Ariel, Poems by Sylvia Plath.
Harper & Row, New York, 1961.

LAND OF SMILINGClaudia Melchior

for a few days
expelled from
the land of smiling

lost
the language

sharpened
the senses

headlines
tears
closing the world

my tummy
under the surface
pain

way out
where to?
home

inside your arms
you caress
my smile

GAURA LINHEIMERIjohn martone

moving my table
to this window –
gaura!

have to go outside
to see you
gaura

stamens – legs –
or antennae
petal-winged gaura

gaura – a white
butterfly's
idea

gaura pistil
reaches wholly
beyond the flower

fingertip
to gaura anther
then stigma

gaura – petals above –
stamens below –
can-can!

thin as
pocket-knife blade
gaura stem

gaura
& every life
filiform

21 LINES WITH JAW INFECTIONLorin Ford

wash hair will shower write sonnet saying same for days
▪
attempt a rave hours days spaces tell them not crow but raven
▪
don’t want you to come in pain read these I’ll go down the street disguised
▪
I’m not anywhere you’ve escaped my imagination nowhere also man
▪
purpose to remain here sleep wake sustain without me will it
▪
bacteria more resilient than thought antibiotics more codeine questions
▪
until and trusting one brown dove in the morning world keep it please
▪
three days the blowfly I can’t see you rise and fright me Emily D.
▪
he proposes a toast a letter postmarked June ’72 postcard soon
▪
hybrid they startle these tall men aquilegia nod ti-tree and freesias
▪ spaces between…soft-shoeing… moodily…the weather unlike haiku▪
smoke but try to walk on it anything exhumed wormholes star-corridors
▪
June and Angus in the hill above the mill here too and the horses hear them
▪
head-butt and knead frequently my cat applies her wise techniques
▪
return to earth refer to bird as mine and the cherry branch it roosts on
▪
explain red-shift why shifts happen see I predicted watch out for Victor
▪
just an old drunk dances lets down my hair we’re not there and yet
▪
yes garden Ganesha a relic note that monkey backpack what marriage
▪
now we internet together get well and kindly I like your gentle
▪
will pop script in letter box Valium too eat three meals and ring if
▪
O was that love the river breaking bridges watching through windows

First published Blue Dog, Vol 5: No 10, December, 2006

SWIFTDick Pettit

a hurtling swift battles against the wind and disappears

a squall: leavers scurry back to the church porch

chrome glitters: an apronned waiter wipes chairs and tables

stacked up in the entry sprinkled with fallen leaves

over the wall a moon rides the clouds rushing beneath

a fair turn-out for the Autumn Handicap*

he joins the protest in a Norfolk Tweed suit and a trilby

Outsource cleaning and catering! – the unions are dished

an agency nurse clutching her cloak, slips on the icy path

fog glows in the street lamps encrusting car windows

an arm round each their walk slows, stopping in a kiss

her smiling look appraises his lips deny all guile

it's a cozy flat; the kettle boils in time for TV news

moonlight in at a window a bike revs on the hill

a truckload of cows takes the back road in the quiet night

the pastoralists of Elgon** live life in the Golden Age

blossom in her hair all the flowers of the valley adorn her bower

his Persephone is insipid booed in Hamburg and Milan***

for their honeymoon they walk across the Alps without a map

Uncle Dick brings back a case of New Zealand wines

intoxication passed talk is steady and sincere into the dawn

we'll leave before it's light to beat the holiday jams

a dusty feel about poppies in dry grass edging the fields

fatigue in the stopping train after a day in London

the snow melts sliding down the window in blurry streaks

so that's a cormorant! pass me the binocs

our children are excited waiting for the sky to clear before the eclipse

to be peeled, cored, and sliced 10 kilograms of windfalls

a wriggled hole dry and crumbly black and in it a worm

the entity's watch-soul talks inside our heads

his thought beam scans a second of arc a thousand light years off

once you were so dear now I hardly recall

she came back a short and awkward trip they both regret

angry clouds behind them on the puddled moorland path

in the courtyard of an abandoned farm a tree blossoms

Ka! shows her Spring collection of confirmation dresses

*Autumn Handicap: a horse race.

**pastoralists of Elgon: The Elgoni live at about 6-8000 ft on Mt Elgon, 14,400 ft, an
isolated ex-volcano on the Kenya-Uganda border.

***Hamburg & Milan: opera houses

BUZZDick Pettit

“Go Away!” a wasp, horse- or snape-fly buzzes in the ear

berries are early this year we'll soon be out collecting

a hot morning the post-man on his scooter wears no helmet

a lady-bird lands on the table showing her wings

my elegant neighbour walks out to her car in full fig

I speed up exit procedures as a warden turns the corner

#

moon on grass the park has too many entrances to be closed at night

a crash in the yellowing leafage can only be an owl

measured words a judge suppresses his views of the justice minister

an ASBO* recreant shifts to the next town

“Not settled. Life was so wonderful when we were in Wogga-Wogga.”

vegetation is sparse in the dry gray soil

keeping their distance cameras click and whirr as an elephant trumpets

snowy boughs frame a rocky peak

the honeymoon couple sleep in bundled sweaters

a mad fit dies coitus interruptus

we walk along the blossoming avenue hand in hand

Easter comes early a gritty wind on the quay

martins skim building high in gables of the custom house

the new scaffolding is up but nothing's doing

a crate of beer empties fast, and shouts become more jolly

the choir bus returns with a non-standard repertoire

golden light birdsong from shadows is gorgeous

I put my shirt back on as evening cools

the monthly accountant works under a midnight skylight and a pink moon

two kittens frolic among the blown-in leaves

actors camp roles at first rehearsal for the opening season

the kiss is sudden but unexpectedly gentle

just good pals but comfort and protection are creeping in

“We're out of money. Why do you buy CDs”

#

a records clerk is hooked on Palestrina and his ilk

Rudolf the Red-nosed cheers the supermarket aisles

a cleared pavement freezes over again in a night of sleet

firm of tread and intention come to announce the scale-down

half the tree and half its blossom is burnt by the children's fire

still a pint left in my one litre Krug

*ASBO: Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Trouble-makers can be banned from a certain area.